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Climate Rewind: Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Back Into Coal

posted by mrpg on Thursday February 28 2019, @08:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-dig-it-up-again dept.

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers have used liquid metals to turn carbon dioxide back into solid coal, in a world-first breakthrough that could transform our approach to carbon capture and storage.

The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new technique that can efficiently convert CO2 from a gas into solid particles of carbon.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing the greenhouse gas from our atmosphere.

Current technologies for carbon capture and storage focus on compressing CO2 into a liquid form, transporting it to a suitable site and injecting it underground.

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 01 2019, @09:44AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday March 01 2019, @09:44AM (#808614) Homepage Journal

    How many single-family homes can be supplied by a 1 GWh per day power plant?

    In 2017, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,399 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of 867 kWh per month. Louisiana had the highest annual electricity consumption at 14,242 kWh per residential customer, and Hawaii had the lowest at 6,074 kWh per residential customer.
    -- How much electricity does an American home use? [eia.gov], US Energy Information Administration

    867 kWh is 3.12e+9 Joules per month. Counting the extra day for leap years, one month has 30.4 days in it. While our homes' batteries only _really_ need to supply us at night, let's be generous so as to cover cloudy days too. So we need a battery that will store 1.03e+8 J - apiece.

    How much does that battery cost?

    While Lithium batteries have many endearing qualities, for residential storage they are quite ill-advised; in my understanding, iron-acid would be far better. But just for grins, let's consider that $23k that a 100 kWh Tesla Replacement Battery runs these days. That would be $23,000.00 / 3.6e+8 J or $0.0000639 per Joule.

    That gives us a price per home of $6,580 for its battery.

    Consider that in 1990, to build a suburban single-family home in Fairfield, California - very typical of places to build such homes - the permits would have set you back forty grand; those mostly go for hookups to such utilities as sewer and water, as well as other government-supplied requirements for each newly-built home.

    These days, I expect Fairfield's permits are more like a hundred grand.

    So it's not at _all_ unreasonable to simply _require_ each new home - however it might be juiced - to come with a seven thousand dollar battery.

    Consider that all by itself, that battery would prevent most blackouts, not because of its backup power but because it smooths out the load for the power company. What makes residential power so expensive is not the fuel, the transmission lines, the power plants and the like, but the multitudes of _fluctuations_. That's why industrial customers pay so very much less than do you or I.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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